"A Christian Heresy"

THE ENLIGHTENMENT, according to Philip Trower, is a Christian heresy, although founded by presumably well-meaning intellectuals, it instead diverges sharply from the Faith to the endangerment of civilization and souls.

To begin with then, there are two facts about the Enlightenment which I believe it is essential to grasp if we are to understand its true historical significance. The first is that, regardless of how it began, the Enlightenment became far more than just another movement in the history of ideas like the Romantic movement. What happened in the drawing-rooms, libraries, and coffeehouses of 18th-century Europe resembled in at least one crucial respect what happened in the deserts of Arabia in the seventh century A.D. A new world religion was born....

When we use words like liberalism, secularism, secular humanism, socialism, or Communism we are merely designating the new faith's main denominations (with freemasonry as a survival of the original 18th-century form). The adherents of these different denominations may disagree about how the final goal is to be reached. But they are at one about the new message of salvation itself. Paradise in this world brought about mainly or entirely by human effort.

See the text of Trower's address, Enlightenment values: Their Social and Political Implications Over Two Centuries, over at Catholic Culture.